Neverending story

After a week or two of enjoyable silence, Diana Simmonds at Stage Noise has joined the I-daren't-call-it-a-media-bandwagon with an opinion piece about the trouble at the mill Opera Australia. It's a characteristic mix of the insightful and the offensive, and having declared my moratorium on the subject, I shan't say much more than that. I would like to point out, however, that if I am the "someone" whose comparison of the Hickox/Stephen pairing to that of Bonynge and Sutherland is pilloried here "ridiculous" and "insulting", then what I wrote has been rather nicely misread. I made that comparison (if it could even be called such) in a very specific context, namely, as a response to a suggestion I had read that no conducting husband should be permitted to engage his singing wife, ever. I merely remarked that such a blanket ban could deny the world of far more fruitful partnerships than Hickox/Stephen. There was no suggestion that the two couples were of equal musical significance. I'm not actually a delusional idiot. Of course, Simmonds may well be alluding to "someone" else, in which case, ignore me.